We’ve announced a next generation Storage Management suite of software that now includes replication management.   Let’s talk about the new product I have had the joy of pampering to launch:  Replication Manager.  For the first time in the industry, here’s a piece of software that allows you to manage the replicas of your data asset across the organization, open systems or mainframe, across all your Hitachi or Hitachi-virtualized storage systems.  And guess what, YOU helped us design it.  Our design and product management teams spent countless hours, customer and partner visits gathering requirements, showing you interface mockups and discussing functionalities, roadmap etc.

Gaining more control over the data protection/DR environment is really a strong theme in the industry. Look at the recent VMWare announcement around their Site Recovery Manager  (in case you’re wondering, yes, we’ve announced our support too, stay tuned!).

The other big news is about our enterprise platform and its flexibility.  A few months ago we announced the availability of our “thin” volume, the dynamic provisioning feature of our USP-V and USP-VM arrays.   By the way, we do have customers using this in production. What’s really new is that we’re adding the ability to replicate these thin volumes with Truecopy or Universal Replicator, our distance replication solutions .  In essence, you can benefit from the economics and flexibility of thin provisioning in your DR infrastructure.  I expect we’ll get some attention with this one!  And yes, those volumes could also be virtualized.

These two big announcements are improving your data storage economics not only because you can leverage the benefits of thin provisioning, but also with the improvements in productivity and efficiency you are going to get from the Replication Manager software.  Not too mention the fact that your infrastructure is becoming more resilient at the same time.  I guess we’ve come a long way from only a few year ago, when it was a few Terabytes per administrators and only synchronous replication was available…

I have spent a lot of time talking to customers and partners about what Business Continuity really is, and invariably, I get a different answer every time I ask people to define it. It is fascinating to me how a simple question can yield so many different answers. It’s usually a combination of “backup”, “disaster recovery”, “high availability” and other permutations with complicated acronyms. I know a lot of these myself, but no one is impressed anymore.

There’s really an elephant in the room when I ask the question – and it’s usually about money and priorities. Seriously, the business and IT decisions that provide the backbone of your IT infrastructure are very complex ones to arrive at, when you do… Let me explain, in many ways, the idea that you have to be in business to backup or recover data assets is somewhat unnatural to many storage and data center managers. Can we blame them?

We’re in the middle of a hurricane that’s deluging petabytes of data on us. I hear customers telling me how their data growth rate is double or triple digits year-on-year, and their budgets not necessarily commensurate (heard this one before?). I recently read an article based on research from a well-known storage analyst that explains how private sector archiving will soon be at tens of thousands of petabytes (that’s a lot of zeros!) of archived data. How do we manage all of these data assets, let alone protect them efficiently and effectively?

So, in this blog, I would like to explore, in time, and with the help of many friends, colleagues, and my keen sense of observation, how we can do a better job driving IT decisions that are essentially intrinsic to how a business needs to be managed, how data assets should be protected, and what technologies can help. How’s that for fun? And expect to hear from what some customers are REALLY doing, and not just the marketing glossies.

Some of the themes I’ll be covering in the next few weeks will revolve around business and technologies like backup and data replication. I asked a few people what they’d be interested in, and there are many technology themes to cover such as multiple data center topologies , managing data protection environments, thin provisioning and replication, very large mainframe environments and replication, de-duplication, the impending death of tape (not so fast!!). On the business front, which really drives the decision, I’ll be spending time on the theme of operational efficiency and resilience, mitigating risks, return on investment vs. data loss, and many more.

What themes would you like to see covered?

Before I go, let me ask you a loaded question: What are your chances of recovering your top 5 critical applications (Do you have those ranked by the way?) should a major interruption hit your data center?